Austinist Movie Review: Redacted More Disappointing Than Santa Anna's Showing at the Alamo

Any publicity is good publicity. Such is the case with Director Brian De Palma's newest controversy du jour, Redacted, which will see a limited run at the Alamo Downtown starting this evening. This film has garnered both praise and outrage from a varied panel of critics, earning the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for De Palma and the scorn of conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly and the Boycott Redacted crew.

Based on the case of soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st division, who raped and murdered 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in her family's home in Mahmoudiya, Redacted follows the spiraling decline of rationality amongst a check point unit, who gun down a pregnant woman when her driver doesn't understand the soldiers' hand signals to stop. Retaliation for this misstep is quick and painful, resulting in the unit's leader being killed by an IED. Distraught from the loss of their touchstone, the soldiers decide to take out their frustrations, both psychological and sexual, on a young girl who passes through their checkpoint every day on her way to school.

It is at this point that we must remind ourselves that any soldier who would rape a 14-year-old, er, 15-year-old-girl, shoot her in the face, torch her body to dispose of the evidence and murder her entire family is no longer a soldier. They are an animal with no country and no loyalties. We also must keep in mind that the soldiers involved in the case which this film is based on have been convicted of their crime.

That being said, this film is a work of fiction and fiction, by its very definition, is meant to be imaginative entertainment. With all of the hubbub and hullabaloo surrounding its release in the measly number of movie houses that producer Mark Cuban happens to own (that's right, he doesn't just own the Dallas Mavericks, he also happens to own the art house chain, Landmark Theaters) you would at least expect that the film be of such outstanding quality and high entertainment value as to demand the uprising that it has fueled. Unfortunately, what we are treated to is a Being John Malkovich-esque trip into De Palma's psyche, which is not a place you want to spend much time in. It seems that the entire point is not to reveal what is actually going on in Iraq, but to reveal what is going on in De Palma's head regarding the happenings in Iraq, with the internet being the only source of accredited information from which he culled his world view.

Far be it from us to imply that the internet could possibly contain a skewed version of the truth; that is not our point at all. Our point is that from the many billions of web pages that De Palma no doubt scoured for juicy stories of battalions-gone-bad, somewhere amongst the blood and gore there had to be stories from the other side. Mass media may be editing what they show to the public, but doesn't that beg the question of whether the same is true of content on the internet? For a film that trumpets TRUTH as its means to an end, we couldn't find anything authentic to hold on to whilst we were pummeled with atrocious acting, complete with desperately bad "hispanic" and "southern" accents, representations of YouTube, MySpace and other web sites that looked like they had been created on a Commodore64, exploitative snuff scenes and a closing sequence that is disgustingly laughable. Add in really wacky interstitials (think Late 1960's Laugh In) and you have a film that is an artistic explosion, and not in a good way.

What De Palma does an admirable job of portraying is just how crazy war makes people. In particular, after the beheading of one of their comrades by enemy combatants, two soldiers with apropos names ("Flake" and "Rush") discuss the death on video, saying that the fallen soldier was their very own "Private Ryan." This lame "tribute" is delivered while one of the men is wearing a duck on his head, giggling as if someone having their head cut off is the newest Brit-Brit crotch shot. If De Palma had added even a shred of humanity to any of these characters, then possibly this film could be seen as an indictment of the recent veto of the house appropriations bill to fund mental health treatment for veterans, but none of the characters are sympathetic enough for us to believe that they would even seek out mental health care.

Come to think of it, we would like to redact our earlier statement. There is one thing that is authentic about this film and it is that De Palma appears to have been so affected by seeing these stories on the world wide web, that he can't bear the weight of his rage and self-imposed guilt; he could not go on doing nothing - he had to make a film to expiate his patriotic demons. For that, we applaud him and the people who still fight for free speech. We just wish that he would have made a film that people would actually want to see.

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By oh, steph in Arts & Entertainment on January 4, 2008 4:05 PM 0 Comments

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oh steph

LoudMouth! It's been so long. Welcome back.

There are probably many reasons why this movie just now made it to Austin, but most likely the main reason is that it only had a 15 screen limited release. I reckon Magnolia pictures didn't want to make a billion prints of this thing, as they knew that they were going to take a bath with what they had already invested and probably weren't willing to open themselves up to any more liability (hence the editing of the final montage of "real photos").

The Dobie is a Landmark theater, but it probably wouldn't have been worth it for them to promote and screen; they definitely don't have the media voice and backing that the Alamo does, even though watching it in the Egyptian tomb room would have been more appropriate.

All that to say that the official release date was back in November, which is why it has been available On Demand for awhile.

LoudMouth

This movie premiered last month on Movies on Demand. Why did it take so long to get to Austin theaters?

waltereg0

Benj,

save yourself the pain of watching this movie just to satisfy your curiousity. It is really awful. If you need more convincing then check out a response I wrote to Film Threat's positive review back in November:

Redacted is the worst movie De Palma has ever made, which is weird because he's made it before (Casualties Of War). The video diary technique doesn't just seem inauthentic, but as more amatuerish than Blair Witch 2 Book of Shadows. The plot is trite and devoid of genuine emotion. The most sickening scene is where the beheading of a US Army soldier is shown in gorey detail, and it is presented as though the soldier deserved it since he participated in the key rape scene. It distorts the incident it was loosely based on completely. The film portrays the jihadis in Iraq as native freedom fighters avenging their countrymen, which couldn't be farther from the reality of Iraqi Alqaeda's genocidal foreign arab terrorists and the ethnic sectarian insurgents who have ruthlessly slaughtered their fellow iraqis by the tens of thousands in the past 4 years. The two US army soldiers that are the movie's bad guys are hollywood caricatures of racist redneck neanderthals, like d-list equivalents of the klansmen in A Time to Kill. They do things that wouldn't really be permitted in the military today, like hang up confederate flags and casually use phrases like "sand n*gger", even around black soldiers. The fat one is called Rush (like RWer Limbaugh), and the stoner Flake. The real Flake was a complete sociopath who was discharged for his psychosis, but this Flake is presented as a generic soldier. The sensitive intellectual in the platoon is called Blix (like Hans Blix, how subtle), the "dead meat" character is called Angel, and the one who will eventually report the rape/murder to the authorities is named Lawyer. Flake falls asleep at the checkpoint and then opens fire on a car that tries to bolt through the checkpoint. Predictably, the car is not a suicide bomber but carrying a pregnant woman. In one of the endless contrived scenes another soldier asks Flake if he feels remorseful and he says shooting hajis is like stomping cockroaches. This after he had been giving away his food to iraqi children in the opening scenes. When an IED is placed near the checkpoint later it is presented as vengeance for the pregnant woman. The IED kills the Danny Glover-esque veteran sargeant. He basically says he's getting too old for this shit just before being atomized by an IED hidden in an armchair he falls into. Seriously, he stumbles and falls into a chair which then explodes just the insurgents planned somehow. Shortly afterward Rush and Flake hatch a plan to rape an attractive local young Iraqi woman whom Rush has groped during her trips through their checkpoint. The rape doesn't seem to be motivated by payback for their dead Sarge so much as Flake and Rush are simply drunk, "horny" and want to "get some". Inexplicably the rest of the squad only whine passively in response. Even the squad's corporal just freezes and then runs outside after Flake sticks a pistol in his face, even though he's holding an M16 the whole time. A third squad member, Salazar, participates in the rape for no apparent reason other than he wants to video it because it's his "ticket to film school". When the rape happens DePalma can't resist altering the real incident (in which a 14 year old girl was raped) to a more salacious one, in which a buxom young iraqi woman has her breasts fondled through her nightshirt by a drooling Rush before being raped while the camera held by one of the rapists does a close-up on her face. It's I Spit on Your Grave repackaged as a political diatribe. Next we see an interview with the tearful father of the murdered iraqi family and he promises that he will get justice without waiting for the US to investigate. So when Salazar is kidnapped and beheaded on video we are supposed to view this as karmic justice. It is repellent and pointless except to provide another sick thrill for Redacted's target audience, people who consider US servicemen as fascist thugs. In real life two US soldiers were abducted and brutally tortured and beheaded, but this was done by Iraqi Alqaeda probably to retaliate for its leader Zarqawi being killed by US forces 9 days prior to the kidnapping. The beheadings were carried out by Zarqawi's successor. After the rape/murder investigation became news Iraqi Alqaeda released a second video spinning the rape/murder as the motivation for the previous months' beheadings but no mention had been made of that when they claimed responsibility then. So the beheadings would have happened regardless of whether the rape/murder incident had ever occurred. Depalma glosses over that, ignoring the very existence of Zarqawi and Iraqi Alqaeda. Instead the implication is that the beheadings are just eye for an eye cycle of violence that the racist american thugs initiated. All this makes Redacted sound like it has a lot of action, but really 90% of it is boring as hell. Nothing whatsoever happens in the first 20 minutes. Redacted's final 20 minutes following the beheading are just filler to stretch its length to 84 minutes. In the beginning we watch Lawyer absent-mindedly crunching and uncrunching a plastic water bottle for half a minute and a drop of sweat run down Rush's face for a quarter minute. After Salazar's beheading we sit through Rush and Flake just bullshitting about nothing for seven minutes straight. Then the movie wanders through Lawyer trying to convince military authorities that an atrocity happened while they try to cover it up. Reality is again completely different in that in 2006 when a soldier reported the incident the military moved swiftly to investigate and prosecute the crime. The real Flake is facing the death penalty and his accomplices were given life sentences. Redacted is plotless propaganda that is hollow to it's core and plays loose with the truth. Just before the credits roll the audience is subjected to a montage of a couple minutes of actual photos of Iraqi corpses and bloody children. No context is given for the photos, but most of the bloody scenes seem to depict the aftermath of car bombings (although one assumes DePalma wants the audience to think they were victims of american attacks). But although the audience is told that these are real photos, the final one (of the rape victim character Farah) is actually staged, using the Farah actress posed to look horrifying. In the real incident Abeer Hamza was the girl who was raped, but DePalma is so focused on demonizing american servicemen as cartoonish racist garbage that he forgets to pay any attention to her, except as an object.

Benj

This is the (unredacted) email I just sent to the Boycotter's website you linked to [the review I'm referrign to is the NYT's]:

Wow.

First, just so you know, I come from a military family, and I feel I have a large amount of respect for the armed services.

Second, I don't feel your ideas about free speech, and what is and what isn't propaganda are very well thought-out. (FOX News, hello?)

Third, if you want people to know something is false, you have to trust them to judge for themselves.

Finally, I just want you to know I wasn't going to see this film until I read your website, specifically your justifications for why I shouldn't see it. Yesterday I read a review that said it wasn't very good or interesting, but now I'm curious.

I guess you've realized, by now, how much extra attention (and money) you've raised for this film.

I highly doubt your censure 'supports the troops' in any meaningful way.